Lateral Distortional Buckling: Predicting Elastic Critical Stress

Abstract
The problem of restrained lateral beam buckling is being treated in this paper. The restraint represents complete lateral and arbitrary continuous rotational restraint of one flange, the latter is represented by the spring stiffness C0. A simple theory, in which the problem is transformed into an ordinary fourth order differential eigenvalue problem is presented and design‐tables are given. It refines a method previously developed by Svensson. The results obtained are compared with exact results for C0=0 (the classical theory) and C0=∞ the latter based on results given in the published literature. For C0=0 a maximum deviation of 1% and for C0= deviations in the range of 1% to 4% were found. The results also confirm that a method proposed by other researchers yields similar good results. It is concluded that the method developed in the present paper, due to its generality and simplicity, provides an accurate and quick method for solving complex lateral distortional buckling problems.